Screenwriter Knott effortlessly handles the nonstop plot complications, doesn’t bother to create actual characters and comes...
Not even their creator’s death can slow down newly appointed Indian Territory marshal Virgil Cole and his friend and deputy Everett Hitch (Blue-Eyed Devil, 2010, etc.) as they board a train for a routine journey that turns out to be anything but.
Virgil and Everett are returning from a trip down south to bring several Mexican prisoners to the Texas border so that they can be summarily executed back home. They don’t expect their train to be held up by gunslingers, which are so numerous that the nine they kill barely make a dent in their numbers. What would attract the attention of such a large cadre of lawbreakers? Not just the presence of the governor of Texas and his wife and daughters, but the $500,000 in cash he plans to invest in a business venture, money the robbers have other plans for. Virgil is rarely at a loss, but he’s surprised when he realizes that the gunmen include Bloody Bob Brandice, who’s just escaped from prison after getting bested by Virgil years before. In addition to being bloody, Brandice is unexpectedly inventive, and the initial robbery turns out to be only the beginning of an increasingly baroque series of maneuvers and countermaneuvers played out first aboard a moving (and eventually a fragmented) train, then in the town of Half Moon Junction, whose leading mercantile establishment is Constable Burton Berkeley’s church-turned-whorehouse, and finally, in the back country where only burros and iron men venture.
Screenwriter Knott effortlessly handles the nonstop plot complications, doesn’t bother to create actual characters and comes a cropper with the laconic dialogue he supplies for Virgil and Everett, who sound like parodies of the strong, silent types Parker created.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-15811-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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